Voices from the Plain of Jars: Life under an Air War (New Perspectives in Southeast Asian Studies) - Softcover

"In this small, shattering book we hear--as we are so rarely able to do--the voices of Asian peasants describing what we can barely begin to imagine."--Gloria Emerson, New York Review of Books "Today, the significance of this book's message has, if anything, increased. As Fred Branfman predicted with uncommon prescience, the massive U.S. bombing of Laos during the Vietnam War marked the advent of a new kind of warfare--automated, aerial, and secret--that is just now emerging as the dominant means of projecting U.S. power worldwide."--Alfred W. McCoy, author of Torture and Impunity: The U.S. Doctrine of Coercive Interrogation "[In Laos, ] where a right-wing government installed by the CIA faced a rebellion, one of the most beautiful areas in the world, the Plain of Jars, was being destroyed by bombing. This was not reported by the government or the press, but an American who lived in Laos, Fred Branfman, who told the story in his book Voices from the Plain of Jars."--Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States "A classic. . . . No American should be able to read [this book] without weeping at his country's arrogance."--Anthony Lewis, New York Times

During the Vietnam War the United States government waged a massive, secret air war in neighboring Laos. Two million tons of bombs were dropped on one million people. Fred Branfman, an educational advisor living in Laos at the time, interviewed over 1,000 Laotian survivors. Shocked by what he heard and saw, he urged them to record their experiences in essays, poems, and pictures. Voices from the Plain of Jars was the result of that effort.
    When first published in 1972, this book was instrumental in exposing the bombing. In this expanded edition, Branfman follows the story forward in time, describing the hardships that Laotians faced after the war when they returned to find their farm fields littered with cluster munitions-explosives that continue to maim and kill today.